SULLE ORME DI PROSPERO - Aracne editrice

SULLE ORME DI PROSPERO
STUDI, RICERCHE E TESTI SULLE LETTERATURE
DI LINGUA INGLESE
2

Direttore
Alessandro GEBBIA
“Sapienza” Università di Roma
Comitato scientifico
Paolo FABBRI
Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali “Guido Carli” (LUISS)
Silvia BURINI
Università “Ca’ Foscari”
Jean–Marie KLINKENBERG
Université de Liège
Isabella PEZZINI
“Sapienza” Università di Roma

SULLE ORME DI PROSPERO
STUDI, RICERCHE E TESTI SULLE LETTERATURE
DI LINGUA INGLESE
Le letterature di lingua inglese rappresentano, in termini
coloniali e postcoloniali, uno degli aspetti più interessanti
e innovativi del mondo anglofono moderno. Australia,
Canada, Caraibi, India, Nuova Zelanda e le diverse realtà
dell’Africa, nate dal disgregarsi dell’Impero britannico, rappresentano
oggi distinti corpi letterari in cui la memoria
dell’impresa coloniale si mescola e si evolve in percorsi
autonomi e originali sempre più ricchi e innovativi che,
pur mantenendo il comune denominatore della lingua inglese,
si costituiscono come altrettanti canoni nazionali
in cui il fatto letterario sembra protendersi verso il limite
estremo delle proprie possibilità. La Collana, pertanto,
intende ospitare non solo studi e ricerche di carattere letterario,
storico e sociologico, ma anche traduzioni di testi
narrativi, poetici e teatrali attraverso i quali scoprire direttamente
i protagonisti di queste letterature.

Contemporary Sites of Chaos
in the Literatures and Arts
of the Postcolonial World
Edited by
Marie–Hélène Laforest
Frances Jane Wilkinson

Copyright © MMXIII
ARACNE editrice S.r.l.
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ISBN 978-88-548-6233-3
I diritti di traduzione, di memorizzazione elettronica,
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Non sono assolutamente consentite le fotocopie
senza il permesso scritto dell’Editore.
I edizione: luglio 2013

Contents
7 Chaos and the Postcolonial: preliminary notes
ANNALISA OBOE
15 Chaos in a Box: the language of diasporic intertextualities in
Suhayl Saadi
ESTERINO ADAMI
31 “Exiles Must Make Their Own Maps”: postcolonial texts and
the explosion of cartography
SIMONA BERTACCO
53 Chaotic Dystopias: life after catastrophe in Margaret Atwood’s
Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood
GIUSEPPINA BOTTA
69 Voicing Chaos: disorder, turmoil and bewilderment in the
work of Edwige Danticat
ELENA MARIA CARRARO
85 A Way into Chaos: creolization and complex cultural systems
ROBERTA CIMAROSTI
105 Sur-viving: life and death in the Nigerian prison
GIULIA D’AGOSTINI
125 “People Connected to the Sky in Their Mind”: chaos and mental
illness in Janet Frame and Patricia Grace
PAOLA DELLA VALLE
5

6
141 “Actions from the South”: Teatro delle Albe and Takku Ligey
Théâtre
CLAUDIA GUALTIERI
155 From Chaos to Canon: some reflections on South African posttransitional
novels
MARIA PAOLA GUARDUCCI
175 Carl Gibeily’s Blueprint for a Prophet (1997): from original
chaos to apocalyptic chaos
JACQUELINE JONDOT
185 Chaos as Social and Cultural Conflict in Aravind Adiga’s Between
the Assassinations and Tabish Khair’s The Bus Stopped
FEDERICA ZULLO
199 Contributors

Chaos and the Postcolonial: preliminary notes
Annalisa Oboe
La terre est un Chaos. Le Chaos n’a ni haut ni bas, et le Chaos est beau.
Édouard Glissant, Tout-monde
The frame of mind from which this book stems and which fuels the
following reflections on chaos is related to what is currently happening
here in the “old world” – in Southern Europe, in Italy, in the Mediterranean
– where we seem to experience, more than at any other time
in recent history, a new season of anomy. There is a feel of the apocalyptic
in the air, a sense that the old order has given way to chaos and
we are facing catastrophe. It is undeniable that, in recent years, a deeprooted
belief in constant development and endless progress has gradually
disintegrated under the impact of unexpected changes in our lives:
we have witnessed our societies wrecked by economic difficulties; the
institutions and infrastructures that sustained common living are
breaking down, and what we used to take for granted is disappearing,
so that uncertainty and lack of hope in the future are now undermining
our hold on the present and hindering our ability to see and plan
ahead.
As we experience this collapse, in other parts of the world – in still
struggling postcolonies, in the borderscapes of migrant life, in the
non-places of globalized economies, in war zones, in what many refer
to as the ‘global South’ – chaos seems to be constitutive of existence
itself. While people of the global North are only now closely facing
the anxiety and impermanence brought about by unprecedented crises
on their own home ground, people in the global South have had “crisis”
literally inscribed in their everyday life for a very long time.
The overall global picture is not only frightening but quite puzzling:
as disasters and catastrophes, individual and public, follow one
another, in the global South and the global North, we are confronted
7

8
Annalisa Oboe
with unforeseeable and irreversible turns, and yet the world seems to
go on its way as usual. Yesterday’s problems are superseded by today’s
emergencies, so that crises, far from being solved, are simply
reconfigured or replaced by some other set of more urgent critical circumstances.
What we are confronted with is indeed “chaos”.
Our wanting to look at contemporary sites of chaos, as the title of
this volume states, is motivated by the will to face these chaotic times,
to try and understand what chaos may mean, and also to ask why looking
at chaos may be interesting for postcolonial studies scholars, writers
and readers.
*
Much has been said about the connection between chaos theory in
science and in recent literature and philosophical thinking, particularly
about the way in which they talk to each other in postmodern culture.
Since the 1990s, in dialogue with the new science, the humanities
have actually worked around a chaotic model of both cultural and individual
identity-formation, which appears particularly suited to our
late modern times.
Chaos theory has been called “the century’s third great revolution
in the physical sciences” (Gleick 1998: 6), as it puts forward a kind of
revolutionary approach to the physical world that admits irregularity,
disorder, unpredictability and uncertainty. As such, it somehow limits
the claims of scientific discourse, and it can be seen as “a radical acceptance
of vulnerability,” to borrow a telling description of deconstruction
by Gayatri Spivak (1990: 18).
First of all, chaos goes against the possibility of always explaining
the world in elegant, linear, reassuring equations. The most popular
image in chaos theory, that of a butterfly flapping its wings on one
side of the world and provoking a storm on the other side, suggests
that approximation (in the name of order and beauty) can be very dangerous
and ultimately lead to undesirable results; it also tells us that
minimal initial variations can produce widely divergent patterns and
outcomes. The implications of the Butterfly effect studied by American
meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the early 1960s run deep whenever
one tries to explain systems or predict change, and not only in
science – chaos and chaotic interference must be accounted for from
the start even when we talk, as we are doing here, about cultures.

Chaos and the Postcolonial 9
The worldview that comes out of chaos theory is far from reassuring
– it produces fragility and insecurity and no long-term revelations
but, on the other hand, it accounts for complexity, which I think is interesting
from a postcolonial cultural viewpoint, because taking chaos
into account produces a complex realm with no easily identifiable hierarchies,
a world where even the smallest detail is important for its
power to influence and change all connections around it, even though
this makes comprehensive description and prediction difficult if not
impossible.
In other words, what chaos theory teaches us is that it is ultimately
the relation between all the elements in a given system which governs
the identity of these elements, none of which can be safely discounted.
To say it with Édouard Glissant, all is connected in this chaos-monde,
and though we cannot project onto it a larger image of order, we can
still revel in its complex dynamics and detect patterns within randomness,
map what is there, and accept unpredictability as an agent of
change.
Chaos as complexity and relation
My first point about chaos and the postcolonial has to do with disorder
and connection, intricacy and entanglement.
It is certainly not by chance that Glissant engages with chaos theory
and explicitly articulates a poetics of chaos in his work. I wish to
recall that at the beginning of his Tout-monde Glissant takes his character-narrator
Mathieu Béluse through a half-hallucinatory, halfvisionary
tour of the Mediterranean – from Genoa and Le Cinque
Terre, to the Tremiti Islands and to Panarea passing through Naples
(where, incidentally, he is kindly invited to the home of an old driver
who had tried to rob him of his money in the first place) – and through
these wanderings, linking sea-places to other sea-places, and islands to
other islands, identical and yet dissimilar, he reflects on connection
and chaos, and what appears to him a beautifully disordered universe:
“The earth is chaos” Mathieu says, “and chaos is beautiful” (Glissant
1993: 54).

10
Annalisa Oboe
Glissant then elaborates on chaotic places and erratic wanderings in
“Le Chaos-monde: pour une esthétique de la Relation” (Glissant 1996:
81-107), where the focus is on the relation, the repulsion, attraction,
connivance and conflict among the cultures of the contemporary
world. The landscape of reference is confusing and unpredictable, but
chaos is not chaotic, Glissant says, and just as chaos theory seeks to
keep chaos and order together (as is indicated by such famous titles on
chaos theory as Prigogine 1984; and Hayles 1991), so for him chaos
can indeed be beautiful, if only we make an effort of the imagination
to track, or trace, not laws but constants that may make sense of complexity.
I will just stress that this is what postcolonial writing and studies
have been doing for quite a while, not always so self-consciously perhaps,
but certainly with a programmatic eye on contact and relation, as
against the isolating/exclusive linearity of grand schemes or narratives.
At the core of this complexity, as often highlighted in creative
and critical works, is “time”, or how we conceive the temporal factor,
and this leads me to the second point I want to make about chaos and
the postcolonial.
Chaos as multiple temporalities and the unpredictable
Glissant himself notices that in the erratic experience of contemporary
cultures people live at the same time in a multiplicity of different
times. What we see is that there is an anarchic temporal synchronicity
of differences in the present which not only does not allow for the
identification of a reassuring movement towards the future, but actually
prevents us from seeing ahead.
The question of the coexistence and intersection of multiple temporalities
in the same cultural space and on a global scale has been recently
taken up, among others, by the Cameroonian intellectual
Achille Mbembe in his work on Africa (On the Postcolony, 2001), and
by anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff in their book Theory from
the South. Or How Euro-America is Evolving towards Africa (2011),
which gives an ironic twist to the evolutionary perspective often employed
in the social sciences.

Chaos and the Postcolonial 11
When we ask “where is our chaotic world going?” we pose a question
about (a lack of) directionality, and about how cultures exist, collide,
converge or change in relation to one another. I believe that if we
take “chaos” as the relational term discussed in the previous section,
then one possible response to the question of directionality is that contemporary
cultures are going simultaneously in multiple directions,
following an intricate web of pathways that do not necessarily lead
forward or backward. If indeed the directionality is multiple, as
Mbembe observes in relation to Africa, which he sees as a challenging
testing ground for contemporary critical theory, then we need “to draw
on multiple models of time so as to avoid one-way causal models,”
and stop reading our chaotic world as an implicitly negative absence
of progressive linearity. What we have to account for in our study of
“the contemporary” and, as regards our present endeavor, its expressions
in literature and the arts is “the multiplicity of the pathways and
trajectories of change” (Mbembe 2012), which challenge traditional
epistemologies and bear immense creative potential. My suggestion is
that what our chaotic, porous, multi-directional field of postcolonial
critical and creative writing brings to the world of knowledge is partly
this kind of imaginative open work, a radical openness that accounts
for complexity and takes multidirectionality, difference and the unpredictable
positively in its stride.
In postcolonial literature there has long been a militant going
against narratives of progress, which not only miss out or erase crucial
points such as the cultural wealth of temporal differences, but risk
perpetuating what Chimamanda Adichie has recently called, in a much
quoted lecture, the “danger of a single story” (Adichie 2009) – a single,
univocal story of catastrophe for some, and of success for others,
which loses sight of alternative temporal and epistemological domains.
What this brief discussion of chaos is adventurously putting together
is jumbling time-scales, different epistemologies, a multiplication
of stories of cultures, and a variety of entangled presents, to
which we should probably add a multiplicity of “chutnified” pasts, to
say it with Salman Rushdie. This is part of the resourcefulness of
postcolonial studies, which have often been criticized, sometimes even
ridiculed as “carnivalesque” but, as Robert Young says in response to

12
Annalisa Oboe
Jean-Francois Bayart’s critique of postcolonial studies in a recent issue
of Public Culture, “I’m willing to go along with the chaos of carnival,
if that means, in Bakhtinian terms, to turn the world upside
down and open up new accounts of knowledge and change” (Young
2011).
Chaos as a form of artistic lateness for our late-style times
I would like to conclude with a reflection that, from ideas revolving
around questions of knowledge and the creative potential of chaos,
leads me to my last point: what is chaos in/for contemporary literatures
and arts? Can we say that chaos is a recognizable form of “late
style” for our late modern times?
I owe the reference to “late style” to one of Edward Said’s inspiring
posthumous essays, “Thoughts on Late Style” (2004), later included in
On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. In this work,
Said talks about late style as the cipher of a kind of art that is facing
death, an art that has lost its grip on totality and is courting catastrophe.
Lateness, Said says quoting Adorno, is “surviving beyond survival”
(2006: 11), and often in the arts this does not lead to harmony
and resolution, but to difficulty, anxiety and contradiction, and to a
nervous tampering with the possibility of closure.
For Said, this type of lateness is a sort of deliberately unproductive
productiveness, a going against, that offers fragments, blank spaces,
fissures, and episodic discontinuities. It produces forms of connection
but no reconciliation, forms straining in opposite directions, which are
held in tension by the artist’s subjectivity, all the time struggling with
fallibility, with lack of direction and ultimately, I would add, with
chaos.
I am aware I am arbitrarily extending what Adorno and Said
thought about the late style of German composer Ludwig van Beethoven
or the Sicilian writer Tomasi di Lampedusa to a discourse on art
confronted with contemporary sites of chaos in the postcolonial world,
or perhaps I may be gesturing towards our late art forms as contemporary
sites of chaos. But this suggestion of “lateness”, in the terms in
which Said describes it, seems to me to reverberate with and in the ex-

Chaos and the Postcolonial 13
perience of many writers and artists today, including those discussed
in the essays published in this volume.
Contemporary Sites of Chaos explores how art registers, reacts to,
analyzes, understands, interprets, represents today’s unruly world,
which has never had to face so closely the possibility of its ending. It
offers suggestive analyses of a variety of chaotic experiences which
have become the object of aesthetic intervention, not only in literature
but also in the performative and visual arts of the postcolonial world,
celebrating the painful and dissonant beauty of imagining and creating
in the face of death.
References
Adichie, C. (2009) “The Danger of a Single Story”. Online. Available
at: (accessed 20 May 2013).
Comaroff, J. and J. (2011) Theory from the South. Or How Euro-
America is Evolving Towards Africa, Colorado, Boulder: Paradigm
Publishers.
Gleick, J. (1998 [1987]) Chaos. Making a New Science, London: Vintage
Books.
Glissant, E. (1993) Tout-monde, Paris: Gallimard.
Glissant, E. (1996) Introduction à une poetique du divers, Paris: Gallimard.
Hayles, K. ed. (1991) Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature
and Science, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony, Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Mbembe, A. (2012) “Africa in Theory” Online. Available at:
http://africa.harvard.edu/harvard-africa-workshop/video-archive/ (accessed
20 May 2013).

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Annalisa Oboe
Prigogine, I. (1984) Order Out of Chaos. Man’s Dialogue with Nature,
New York: Bantam Books.
Said, E. (2004) “Thoughts on Late Style”, London Review of Books
26.15, 5 August: 3-7.
Said, E. (2006) On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the
Grain, New York: Pantheon Books.
Spivak, G. (1998) The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies,
Dialogue, New York and London: Routledge.
Young, R. (2011) “Bayart’s Broken Kettle,” Public Culture 23.1: 167-
175.

Chaos in a Box: the language of diasporic intertextualities
in Suhayl Saadi
Esterino Adami
Writing is the act of being outside. It is the
scream of the excluded.
Suhayl Saadi, The Burning Mirror
Essi ritenevano che il segreto fosse grande, e
quanto più lui giurava di non possederlo, tanto
più erano convinti che lo possedesse, e fosse un
segreto vero, perché se fosse stato falso lo a-
vrebbe rivelato.
Umberto Eco, Il pendolo di Foucault
In 2009 Suhayl Saadi, the writer of Pakistani and Afghani origin, authored
Joseph’s Box, a novel in which chaos seems to be the governing
paradigm, as it blends different historical, cultural and narrative
levels, has a multilayered textual organisation and numerous references
to European and Asian cultures. Saadi himself affirms in an interview
that “[it] is not written to conform to the internal or macroscopic
structures of the standard novel” (in Shaikh 2010: 151).
Essentially the book involves three main overlapping storylines
concerned with the lives of Zuleikha Chasm Framareza MacBeth, a
general practitioner from an ethnically mixed family, Archibald Enoch
MacPherson, her WWII veteran terminally ill patient, and Alexander
Wolfe, a lute player. In the waters of the Clyde, Zulie and Alex find a
mysterious box which contains six other boxes, each tied to an obscure
clue, which actually corresponds to one leg of an east-bound
journey. As the quest-based movement leads from Glasgow to Argyll,
Lincolnshire, Sicily, Lahore, and Baltistan, the accumulation of
Zulie’s and Alex’s dreams, hopes, fears and anxieties, along with
15

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Esterino Adami
Archie’s distant echoes and memories, grows into a web of stories, in
which the representation of chaos is employed to tackle issues such as
diaspora, identity and transformation. In this paper I will apply chaos
theory to Saadi’s novel in order to show how the author audaciously
expands the porous boundaries of diasporic writing.
The novel is deeply rooted into a plurality of styles and modes of
storytelling, drawing from music, poetry, history, myths and other cultural
fields, and this technique, like a challenging game of Chinese
boxes, multiplies the flow of narrations. Against this multifaceted context,
I argue that chaos does not represent a mere instance of Babellike
anarchy, but rather, that it encapsulates the manifestations, frictions
and contradictions of cultures and traditions, as reshaped by the
centripetal forces of diasporic imagination and postmodern intertextuality.
The plot of the novel seems to be set in motion by a fortuitous episode,
namely Zulie’s discovery of a mysterious box in the river. This
apparently mundane event generates a chain of intersected stories and
can be interpreted – in scientific terms – as an instance of deterministic
chaos, which refers to “the context, the medium we inhabit in everyday
life, ubiquitously allowing for, and indeed mandating individuality
as well as unpredictability within a determined order” (Hawkins
1995: 1-2). This notion of chaos seeks to cluster the number of possibilities
of what can happen in real (and fictional) worlds, and determines
a concatenation and combination of events, which in turn may
generate consequences and repercussions. It opens up the binary opposition
of order and disorder in the attempt to consider the complexities
and negotiations of cultures and societies.
According to Hayles, “at the centre of chaos theory is the discovery
that hidden within the unpredictability of chaotic systems are deep
structures of order” (1991: 1). Chaos theory therefore, rather than envisaging
destiny as a prescribing monolithic and inscrutable power,
tries to question the concatenations of events and consequences
emerging from the ‘comingling’ of different situations. In this perspective,
the multiple narrative progression that Saadi deftly works
out, redesigns and goes beyond the notions of order and disorder, creating
fresh alternatives, viewpoints and interpretations. Considering
that “art’s complex nonlinear systems are […] inherently chaotic and

Chaos in a Box 17
therefore at odds with comparatively linear critical, aesthetic, moralistic
and ideological ideals of order” (Hawkins 1995: 5), the writer exploits
the power of chaos in toto so as to give voice and visibility to
migrants, women and the elderly, who may be regarded as liminal social
subjects.
To achieve such an ambitious goal, Saadi illustrates chaos through
the amplified mechanisms of postmodern intertextuality, which not
only reproduce the unstable condition of the contemporary age, but
also capture the uncertainty of the “migrant condition”. In Saadi, intertextuality
can be seen as a key strategy that permits the interspersing
of different social, historical and cultural levels, combining the remaking
of nationhood in the light of Scottishness and migrancy, the colonial
history of Britain, the ancient customs of Arabo-Persian and
Asian civilisations, as well as other references. Indeed, intertextuality
can be seen as a “term which continually refers to the impossibility of
singularity, unity, and thus unquestionably authority” (Allen 2000:
209), and the writer adopts this tool so as to affirm the power of multiplicity
within and through various cultures, languages and traditions.
With regard to the extensive literary production of the author, and
to Joseph’s Box in particular, Stotesbury affirms that “his narrative
blends and ‘translates’ (or hybridises) mythologies and cultures, both
ancient and utterly contemporary” (2010a: 90), and, as such, it shapes
the mimetic processes that extensively draw on the productive sites of
postcolonial and postmodern chaos. Language, thus, constructs both in
the text and in the reader’s perception the overwhelming accumulation
of references and symbols through which cultures influence each
other.
Given the textual richness of Joseph’s Box, it is important to take
into account the novel’s spatial deixis, in particular the places evoked
and reconstructed through the eyes of Zulie and Alex as novel wayfarers
who cross geographical, cultural and mental borders to solve the
enigma of the boxes. Their quest represents an act of unearthing the
past and its copious cultural and historical stratifications, with their
echoes of both the dimension of myth and the postcolonial heritage.
The first locations that the two protagonists visit in the UK (Glasgow,
Argyll and Lincoln) appear to be imaginary “stations” along a perilous
pilgrimage and are portrayed as subterranean worlds belonging to a

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Esterino Adami
decayed past and emerging from the accretion of detritus, memories
and relics.
Consequently, Zuleikha and Alex’s descent into the labyrinths of
the underworld acquires mythical value as a rite of passage towards
other places, other states of consciousness and perception. The two
characters want to decrypt the various clues of the boxes they find, but
in doing so not only do they challenge a mystery, but they also question
themselves, as well as their past and present experiences. In the
framework of chaos theory, the notion of myth can be seen as a fundamental
interpretative category, and is reminiscent of the fact that
“while myth may be paradigmatic, and while it may imply a given social
and cosmic order, or perfection, it also carries with it a promise of
another mode of existence entirely, a possible way of being just beyond
the present time and place” (Coupe 2009: 9). By stepping into an
indefinite “elsewhere”, the protagonists unconsciously decide to reshape
their identities and search for a new direction in their lives.
Chaos emerges as a “creative necessity” (Hawkins 1995: 4), an urge to
go through knowledge and understanding, which also functions
through the Pantagruelian style of the author who builds up a huge
wealth of interfusing symbols, traditions and stories.
After leaving Britain, the two protagonists head for Palermo and
subsequently Lahore. The two cities are portrayed as “postcolonial
places”, in which the chaotic signs of the past – palaces, churches,
mosques, havelis – mingle together and constitute a reluctant transition
towards uncertain (post) modernity (Adami 2012a). In both locations,
for Alex and Zuleikha dilapidated buildings are mute and seductive
witnesses of complex and ancient cultures through time and
space. For the woman, Palermo is a Mediterranean city that builds up
its identity by compressing histories and stories. Here, although the
old buildings of the city centre are rundown and crumbling, they jealously
keep secrets and meanings, transforming names, words, and traditions:
The word medina meant simply the centre of a town. Palermo’s centre
was a medina, since it had once been an Arab city, Bal’harm. In fact,
Zuleikha had read that in those days, Palermo had been known as simply Almadina:
the City. La Kalsa, Al-Aziz, Piazzetta Garraffo, Seralcadio, Lat-